I saw another question on how to use META tags today, specifically on the use of Title, Description, Keywords and Footer. Here’s a copy of my response:
The Title tag is what appears in the blue bar at the very top of your browser window.
Google currently appears to place a lot of emphasis on this in search results. This title is also what appears as the blue heading of each item in the natural search results – the equivalent of the headline in an Adwords ad. So it’s worth thinking carefully about what you put there.
Keep titles to 80 characters or less and make them unique to each page
The Description is what appears under the title in the search results, and describes what your page is about. Think of this as an Adwords ad – a way of enticing people to click through to your page.
Keep descriptions to 150 characters or less and make them unique to each page.
The META Keywords are the primary keywords for the page. Don’t use too many – I use no more than 10 – 12, often less. Keywords should be unique to each page.
Think of these keywords in the same way you think about keywords for an Adwords or Yahoo Search Marketing ad.
The ‘footer’ is not a META tag, but you can use the footer area of your page to place the code for Google Analytics or any stats tracking software.
Place this code after the </html> tag and before the </body> tag, which you’ll find near the bottom of your page in the source code view.
Apart from the Title, Description and Keywords, there are plenty more META tags available. Because the search engines are continually changing their algorithms, I use most of them on all my pages, even though many will tell you they’re no longer relevant.
The reason I do that is because Google may appear to be placing emphasis on page titles now, but who knows what they’ll be doing in 6 months time.
Apart from that, it’s simply good practice to set your page up properly – it makes it more resilient to the changing whims of the search engines.
The best and easiest way to get on top of this quickly is to go to one of the many sites that will generate your META tags for you – free.
They will ask you simple questions that you respond to in a web form and then they create a full set of META tags from your answers. You simply copy the code they give you into the source code view of your page between the <head> and </head> tags, and you’re done.
The site I use for this is here.
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